The Significance of Blogging

Digital activism is allowing 22 countries to develop solidarity against oppression. The thousands of bloggers in the MENA seem to understand what is needed from them in these times. They understand that they are not journalists and that is a positive thing. They don’t care about the fame a journalist might care about or have to go through the same obstacles to release their information. What impresses me time and again is that all these digital activists/bloggers are speaking just speaking their mind and reporting their account of the truth and letting the citizens decided everything after that. The bloggers need to be able to get around the issues a journalist can’t in order to fight against the current censorship laws their countries already have in practice.

The platforms the bloggers are given to write what they need to write is just as important. Without certain people creating a website and maintaining it, thousands of people’s voices would be silenced in an already quiet regime of censorship. Someone like Bassel Khartabil who wrote code to make Firefox work in Arabic. Human rights activists are always looking for ways to help open back up countries where free speech is limited and we’ve seen that the internet is our only solution for this.

This brings me back to the consumers of this information. We have people like Bassel starting platforms for free speech and then we have the thousands of bloggers noting the events and experiences felt. This leaves the rest of us to analyze the information make form our opinions and do something about it. There are so many ways to contribute, even just online.